Previews

Castle Shikigami 3

Spaceships and biplanes can get tiresome. Here's a top-down shooter with a different approach.

Spiffy:

2D shooters are still popular in some circles.

Iffy:

Not a huge departure from the many other games in this genre.

Tucked away at the Microsoft Xbox 360 booth at the Tokyo Game Show is a shooter named Shikigami no Shiro III, the latest in what's known in America as the Castle Shikigami series. What separates this game from your classic arcade top-down shooter is that the player doesn't control a ship or plane of any sort, as instead your avatar is an anime-styled character with the power to fire obscenely huge projectiles (or in some cases, wide-spread bullet sprays).

Just Hold Down The Button

The gameplay is fairly simplistic, with two buttons to keep track of. One will fire your main projectile. The second button fires off your special bomb attack, which is good for clearing the screen when things get a bit too hectic. In addition, you can use the shoulder button to swap between the two characters you choose from at the character select screen, allowing you to mix things up during gameplay if one character's skills would be more useful than another.

The character designs range from the classic to the somewhat bizarre. You have an attractive, classy lady with long-sleeved gloves and an attitude, an unmasked ninja type with fishnet arm stockings, a tough guy with an eyepatch and exaggerated facial scar, and a mysterious man wearing a hat and sunglasses. The characters get a bit more eccentric, with a young man in Victorian dress, including the frilly white sleeves, a witch with an unnatural obsession with the color purple, and even a young girl with a bunny on her head, wearing a Puzzle Bobble backpack.

These aesthetic differences don't matter as much as the projectiles they fire, which range greatly from character to character. The ninja, for instance, fires a steady stream of large shuriken in a straight line. This makes him more challenging to play with than most of the other characters as this attack doesn't cover much of the playfield and lacks the defensive capabilities of those projectiles that fire in an arc, like the wide spray of the little girl.

We played the two demo stages, and found that the gameplay was very much like most of the other vertical top-down shooters we've tried. The challenge of dodging hails of slow-moving bullets is a tried and true standard of videogaming that may never truly disappear, although some games clearly iterate this concept stronger than others. We'll keep an eye on Castle Shikigami 3, which may or may not be coming to the US anytime soon.